Our Land Was a Forest: An Ainu Memoir

by Mark Selden and Kayano Shigeru

Book Overview

This book is a beautiful and moving personal account of the Ainu, the native inhabitants of Hokkaido, Japan's northern island, whose land, economy, and culture have been absorbed and destroyed in recent centuries by advancing Japanese. Based on the author's own experiences and on stories passed down from generation to generation, the book chronicles the disappearing world--and courageous rebirth--of this little-understood people.Kayano describes with...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 081331707X
• ISBN13: 9780813317076
• Release Date: April 1994
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 172 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

"The Vanishing Ainu" are still there !

Sometimes the way things repeat themselves is uncanny. Just as the American literature of the early 20th century reflected the idea that the Native Americans would soon vanish, and writers in Australia and New Zealand pontificated on similar lines on their aboriginal neighbors, so in Japan, the aboriginal Ainu have long since been labelled "mysterious, but vanishing". To tell the truth, I thought they had already gone by the 1980s. I was wrong. Here is an autobiography, written by Kayano Shigeru, an Ainu of around 60 when he originally wrote, that informs us that the Ainu are far from gone. Kayano is personally responsible for building up a collection of Ainu artifacts, for preserving a great number of `yukar' or epic poems, for writing an Ainu-Japanese dictionary, for helping establish Ainu language primary schools in Hokkaido, and working in the political sphere to improve the lot of Japan's only aboriginal people. This memoir tells in very simple, matter-of-fact style about his early years of grinding poverty, the hardships suffered by all his fellow villagers, about being a draft laborer, about life hunting, fishing, and logging in the deep forests of Japan's northernmost island. Kayano's life is not specifically "Ainu", it is life in a mixed world of changing conditions. Japanese, Ainu, and even Western cultural strands mingle, but the author never tries to separate them. Whatever Ainu people of his generation faced, that, for him, is Ainu life. This is very effective in a way, though foreigners without much knowledge of Japan will be hard-pressed to figure out what is unique here. Kayano tells a straightforward tale, but natural reticence and perhaps lack of higher education mean that he does not delve much into psychology, he seldom develops other characters. A few sentences at most suffice. He often reports events with little comment. His feeling for his land and for his people's condition come straight from the heart, though. Nobody can remain unmoved by that.OUR LAND WAS A FOREST reminds me very much of Native American memoirs, though in this case there is no attempt whatsoever to play up "mystical" aspects or try to be a "wise, traditional guru". The Ainu experience has been close to that of other aboriginal peoples from Siberia to Sydney, from Boston to Buenos Aires. The harmony of their life in nature was disrupted by the coming of greater numbers of more organized, materialistic peoples. The book is easily read and contains a number of useful black and white photographs. If you need much background knowledge on the Ainu, this might not be the place to begin, but if you are looking for an interesting book on a little heard-from people, choose this one.

Toward Understanding of Aboriginal People

Shigeru Kayano gives candid and passionate voice to an aboriginal people. The breath of the Ainu pour from each page as he narrates his life ...from the snow on his skin as small boy playing in his native homeland of Ainu Mosir (lit: Peaceful Land of the Ainu), to his grandmother's lessons and father's disillusionment, through naive comments of tourists at bear-sending ceremonies, and finally to his political ascent as the first Ainu elected to the Japanese Diet.More then a memoir, Kayano records Ainu traditions, language and sentiment along side of the oppression that sucked the lives of able bodied Ainu into 'draft labor' and almost drove the Ainu culture into forgotten unwritten history.Our Land Was a Forest is the courageously humble saga of an aboriginal people written by the harbinger of traditional revival.